Old PC, games, what do?

[irisofpurity]

I have an old Packard Bell imedia s3210, here are the specs:

* AMD Athlon 7450 dual-core processor at 2.4ghz
* 2GB DDR2 SDRAM
* NVIDIA nForce 730a chipset
* NVIDIA 8200/9200 GFX (seems ambiguous as to whatever this is...)
* 1TB HDD

I wanna play some old, mid-2k and late-2k games as well as some lower end early 2010s games most likely, what would be the best thing to upgrade? I'd say the GFX, they - from what research I was able to gather - are a cheap integrated solution for laptops from 2007...

 

[danhodge]

Best advice i can give is to just google the system specs of the games you want to play, and compare. For example, these are the Halo 2 system specs (2004) and you appear to meet those in all but gpu. Same situation with Half life 2 and mirrors edge, but although i can tell these games require dedicated graphics cards, I have no idea how the 8200 compares, since it's quite hard to find benchmarks for. From what I've found, it compares relatively well to the 6800, but that's from very limited information.

So yeah, if you can upgrade anything, i'd say go for the gpu, I never saw any sub 2010 games recommend more than 1GB ram, and the processors probably fine. But more importantly, why not try one out first and see how it performs now? If you're willing to avoid post 2009 games, and maybe keep the settings low, then you should be fine. But once you get to 2010+, you're gonna run into one bottleneck after the other, and end up needing to replace everything anyway.

See which games, and which don't, and you'll get a good idea of how good your system compares, especially if you look at the recommended specifications for each game

 

[PP Mguire]

Those nForce IGPs all use the same chip with a different ID for marketing. Performance is actually more on par with the Geforce 6200 which was terrible even in comparison to other 2005 GPUs. I would say get yourself a cheap GPU, any of the bottom of the barrel things like the GT 1030 will run circles around the IGP and do what you want to do.